Last summer, the oldest public university in America was sued
for requiring students to read a book. The lawsuit seeking to block the
assignment was dismissed on appeal, for sound constitutional reasons.After reading the book over the summer, 2260
first-year students met on August 19 for one 2-hour session to discuss Michael
Sells' Approaching the Qur’an.The “required” sessions went off smoothly, without assigning grades or
taking attendance, while dozens of news reporters crawled over the campus
seeking sound bites. Students wondered what all the fuss was about. What was
really going on in this controversy?

When the Summer Reading Program Committee at UNC
asked me if there was a good translation of the Qur'an that would be suitable
for its program, I immediately thought of Michael Sells' translation of the
short suras from the end of the Qur’an.If this particular book were not available, I cannot think of any other
translation of the Qur'an that I would have recommended to assign to our
incoming students.

As
I thought over the obvious pedagogical reasons for this choice, it occurred to
me to wonder whether the selection might prove controversial, but at the time,
that seemed a remote possibility. To my surprise, there was significant
resistance among some students and faculty on the committee to a translation of
the Qur’an.The questions raised were
phrased in terms of the difficulty of the text and its strangeness to most students,
but there was a tension beneath these discussions that would soon be reflected
in public debate. Eventually, however, the committee chose this book, although
with a divided vote.

What
were the underlying issues? First, the conservative Virginia-based Family
Policy Council initiated a lawsuit charging that a reading and discussion
assignment involving a partial translation of the Qur’an amounted to
proselytism, and was an attempt to convert students to Islam. This was an
attack on the academic and comparative study of religion, going against
well-established Supreme Court guidelines on teaching about religion (as
opposed to teaching religion in religious communities). With considerable
hypocrisy, this group accused UNC of violating the separation of church and
state, though they made it clear they would welcome a reading assignment
involving the Bible.

Next,
this controversy helped bring to the surface a strong current of anti-Muslim
prejudice that had lain dormant since President Bush’s post-9/11 pronouncement
that “Islam is not the enemy.” Quite clearly, there are many Americans who
disagree with President Bush on that point. This anti-Muslim prejudice goes
back to the middle ages, but has become especially virulent in the colonial
encounters of the past two centuries. It has much in common with anti-Semitism
and racism as a powerful form of bigotry, although it is much more acceptable
in public today. Subsequent attacks on the Prophet Muhammad by well-known
Christian fundamentalist leaders indicate that this entrenched bias will
continue to be a major controversial theme in our immediate future. The Qur’an
incident also revealed how dominant fundamentalist modes of thinking are today,
not only within major religious traditions, but also in the interpretation of
other religions; the attacks on Islam not only assumed that Muslim
fundamentalists represent “true” Islam, but also applied (negative)
fundamentalist interpretive techniques to the text of the Qur’an.

But
the attack on the summer reading program was actually launched by conservative
commentators on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News TV channel, demonstrating the
important role of the news media in creating and sustaining stories about
religious controversy. There was a wide range, however, of media reporting on
this incident. Some journalists indulged in Muslim-baiting tactics; the host of
Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” program compared the Qur’an to Hitler’s Mein Kampf,
which he also would have prohibited students from reading. As Sells has pointed
out in a valuable summary on his web page (http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/UNC_ApproachingTheQur'an.htm),
journalists for Time magazine and some major newspapers trivialized the
issue, and certain conservative commentators blatantly and irresponsibly
distorted the facts of the situation. On the whole, however, I found that most
journalists recognized how close is the connection between academic freedom and
freedom of the press.Many of them
showed remarkable professionalism and insight, and it is particularly notable
that local North Carolina journalists provided some of the most accurate and
telling accounts of the entire episode. One of the best stories is an extended
piece by the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly television program on PBS
(21 August 2002). The UNC Qur’an story received its share of international
attention as well, including a feature on the BBC radio news hour. The funniest
story was on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” in a hilarious piece by Mo
Rocca.

The
other major public forum for this controversy was the state of North Carolina,
which for many years has had a love-hate relationship with the flagship campus
of the state university in Chapel Hill. UNC-CH Chancellor James Moeser from the
beginning provided solid and unflinching support for the Qur’an selection,
despite receiving a flood of mail, including many complaints about the
assignment. The university did blink a bit, however, in mid-July, clarifying
that students who found the assignment “offensive” could avoid reading the
book, but that they should write a 1-page essay explaining why they could not
do so. Those critics who wished to spare our freshman the shock of reading a
non-Christian text evidently would have been surprised to learn that North
Carolina requires the study of non-European religions in the junior high school
social studies curriculum.

The
lawsuit against UNC galvanized the faculty by its threat of outside control of
University. But when members of the UNC Board of Governors on Aug. 9 proposed a
resolution affirming the principles of academic freedom, the measure failed to
pass, ostensibly for technical reasons. A few days later, the UNC Faculty
Council resoundingly passed a motion in favor of academic freedom.
Simultaneously, the North Carolina House of Representatives passed a budget
including an amendment to deny funding to any UNC summer reading program
assignment devoted to one particular religion, unless it includes “all known
religions.” Legislators saw the Qur’an assignment as equivalent to support for
Muslim terrorists. "I see this as insensitive, arrogant and poor timing to
allow students to read about our attackers," said Rep. Gene Arnold, a
Republican from Nash County. The amendment ultimately disappeared in budget
negotiations with the Senate. Two federal courts dismissed the lawsuit against
UNC, and the discussion sessions took place without a hitch on August 19.Belatedly, several days later the UNC Board
of Governors approved unanimously a resolution in favor of academic freedom.

Faculty
members, administrators, students, and staff at UNC supported the summer
reading program enthusiastically. The 178 volunteer discussion leaders included
the chancellor and provost, the chair of the Board of Trustees, Jewish and
Christian chaplains of student religious organizations, librarians, graduate
students, and faculty from many different departments and schools. In
representing the university to the press, members of the Summer Reading Program
Committee took a leading role, especially committee chair Robert Kirkpatrick, a
professor of English literature.I
myself gave dozens of interviews. Chancellor Moeser appeared in countless
venues, including NPR’s “Morning Edition,” ABC’s “Nightline”, plus “Good
Morning America.”The university news
staff worked heroically to manage the demand for interviews. A media consultant
coached me and Provost Robert Shelton in the techniques of producing sound
bites for television reporters. The experience was both exhilarating and
exhausting.

Dozens
of letters and emails from around the country and from overseas addressed this
controversy, with about four out of five that I received being strongly in
favor of UNC and the assignment. Critics included conservative Christians as
well as secularized Muslims, who were equally outraged that the Qur’an should
be read instead of refuted.Supporters
of the assignment, from many different religious and non-religious backgrounds,
praised UNC for advocating knowledge over ignorance during a time of panic.

My
favorite comment came from Malaysian human rights activist Chandra Muzaffar:
“There was a report in yesterday's newspapers here in Kuala Lumpur about the
controversy, with a picture of you. UNC’s intellectual integrity and moral
courage are a beacon of hope for the academic community, worldwide. Irrational
fear, prejudice and suspicion will remain the enemies of justice, truth and
honesty for a long while to come. Here in Malaysia we have to combat another
type of irrationality - the irrationality of those who subscribe to a dogmatic
approach to Islam. Their thinking is as pernicious as that of individuals who
fear any contact with the religion.”

This
summer reading program was not a revolution. The percentage of participation by
students – about 65% -- was about the same as last year’s, and the discussion
sessions varied considerably in quality. But a couple of things were achieved
in this process. First, the university community made a strong affirmation of
academic freedom in the face of attempts by outside religious and political
forces to control what books are read. Second, the university declared by this
example that it is time to make understanding Islam part of a liberal arts
education. Both these conclusions should be kept in mind as we face the challenges
ahead of us.